Russians headed to the polls on March 15 to take part in presidential elections in which longstanding incumbent Vladimir Putin is widely expected to win six more years in office.
Voting will be conducted over three days, with final results likely to be announced early next week.
Mr. Putin is typically portrayed in the West as a dictator and war criminal, due in large part to Russia’s two-year-old invasion of eastern Ukraine.
Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden—who will himself face elections this year—went so far as to call his Russian counterpart a “crazy SOB.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Putin, who has led Russia for almost 25 years, continues to enjoy broad support among his domestic constituents.
Supporters credit him with restoring Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse in the 1990s and for standing up to what they regard as a hegemonic and decadent West.
“I support Putin. Of course, I will vote for him,” Moscow resident Lyudmila Petrova, 46, told Reuters on the first day of the vote.
“Putin raised Russia up from its knees,” she said. “Russia will defeat the West and Ukraine.”
“You cannot defeat Russia—ever,” Ms. Petrova added.
In recent years, Mr. Putin’s approval ratings have typically topped 80 percent, according to Russian official sources.
The Epoch Times could not independently verify these figures, which Mr. Putin’s critics—both at home and abroad—say are exaggerated.
According to Russia’s TASS news agency, more than 114 million citizens are eligible to cast ballots at some 94,000 polling stations.
Polling stations will remain open for 12 hours—from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.—on all three days of the vote, according to TASS.
3 Challengers
Mr. Putin faces three other presidential contenders, none of whom are expected to pose a serious challenge to him.These are Nikolay Kharitonov of Russia’s Communist Party, Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democratic Party, and Vladislav Davankov of the recently founded New People Party.
Mr. Putin, for his part, is running as a nominal independent despite his close association with the United Russia Party, which currently holds 325 of 450 seats in the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament).
First established in 2001, United Russia has held a majority of seats in the assembly since 2007.
Although Mr. Putin is no longer a formal member of the party, he is widely regarded as its de facto leader.
The Just Russia party, which holds 28 Duma seats, has also endorsed Mr. Putin’s candidacy.
Two would-be anti-war candidates—Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova—were barred from running by Russia’s official electoral commission due to alleged bureaucratic irregularities.
Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition figure and outspoken critic of Mr. Putin, died abruptly last month—at the age of 47—in an Arctic penal colony.
Mr. Navalny’s death on Feb. 16 sparked a flurry of accusations from his supporters—and Western leaders—that he had been murdered.
The Kremlin has denied any state involvement in his death, which the Russian authorities have attributed to natural causes.
‘New Territories’ Take Part in Vote
Controversially, residents of what Moscow calls the “new territories”—namely, the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhya regions—are also taking part in the presidential poll.In 2022, Moscow effectively annexed the four Ukrainian regions—after holding controversial referendums—and now considers them part of the Russian Federation.
Ukraine and its Western allies reject the legitimacy of the annexations and regard all four regions as “Russian-occupied territory.”
According to Kyiv, the fact that residents of the four regions are taking part in the presidential poll demonstrates Moscow’s “flagrant disregard for international legal norms and principles.”
“Forcing millions of Ukrainian citizens who live in temporarily occupied territories … to participate in these so-called ‘elections’ is illegal,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
It also urged residents of the four annexed regions not to take part in the vote.
Washington likewise condemned what it called the “sham elections [being] held in occupied Ukrainian territories.”
“The United States does not—and will never—recognize the legitimacy or outcome of these sham elections held in sovereign Ukraine as part of Russia’s presidential elections,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
“The results of these Potemkin-style exercises will be dictated by Moscow and cannot reflect the free will of the citizens of Ukraine,” he told reporters on March 14.
‘Uneven Playing Field’
Mr. Putin, 71, was first appointed Russia’s acting president by Boris Yeltsin on the last day of 1999.Mr. Yeltsin, the country’s first post-Soviet leader, served as Russia’s president from 1991 to 1999, when he appointed Mr. Putin as his successor.
In 2000, Mr. Putin won a presidential election with 53 percent of the vote. He was reelected in 2004, clinching 71 percent of all votes cast.
Dmitry Medvedev, a close Putin ally (and current deputy head of Russia’s Security Council), won the next presidential election in 2008, while Mr. Putin assumed the post of prime minister.
Mr. Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 after winning elections with almost 64 percent of the vote.
The next poll was held in 2018 after a constitutional amendment was made extending the length of the president’s term from four to six years.
Mr. Putin also won that election, in which he also ran as an independent, with almost 77 percent of all votes cast.
Following the 2018 poll, a report released by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe stated that candidates had been able to “campaign freely.”
The report added, however, that “extensive and uncritical” media coverage of Mr. Putin’s campaign had served to create an “uneven playing field.”
